An affair to remember

The year was 2006. Donald Trump’s third wife, Melania, 36, gave birth to a baby boy named Baron. Unbeknownst to Melania, her husband, 24 years her senior, began a steamy love affair with a porn star named Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The affair lasted a year. In 2011, the porn star gave an interview to a magazine spilling juicy details of their affair. The press didn’t pay much attention, until recently when the scandal broke and reached all print and TV news outlets. The first to break the news was The Wall Street Journal whose intrepid reporting tracked down $130,000 payment made to Stormy Daniels by Trump’s personal attorney. It was to buy her silence a month before the November 2016 presidential elections.

Hungry for salacious details of the affair between the president and a porn star, respected newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and all others carried raunchy details filling full pages along with photos of Trump and Stormy Daniels during their love affair. The story has not died down and surfaces almost daily on TV prime time, newspapers and magazines. This week alone, the NYT published details of a hugely publicised show featuring “world’s most important porn star — with her presidential ties and a reported six-figure reason not to confirm them.” Hundreds crowded the hall, including a number of journalists who were assigned to watch the show and then report back with stories like this one: “The music came on. The clothes came off. And an airport strip club claimed its piece of the American presidency…

“The 38-year-old headliner was setting off on what is being called the ‘Making America Horny Again Tour’ capitalising on her spin through a Trump news cycle.”

More fireworks await Trump who is scheduled to give his first-ever State of the Union address on January 30. Jimmy Kimmel, a late-night talk show host, has booked porn star Stormy Daniels aka “Donald Trump’s alleged former mistress” to appear on his show the same day, just hours after the president delivered his address to the Joint Houses of US Congress.

Were the ‘holier than holy’ Evangelists shocked? These guys who blasted president Bill Clinton for his affair with an intern. Not at all. William Franklin Graham, 99, is the president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. When 9/11 happened, Graham was in the forefront against Islam and the Holy Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) claiming that Islam fostered terrorism. But the loudmouthed priest and his fellow Christian minister Pat Robinson, who castigated Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in the worst of terms, don’t find Donald Trump’s act reprehensible. These so-called ministers have minted millions by pretending to preach Christianity to their teeming followers. Trump, who has never been religious or pretended to be, is a hero for hypocrites like Graham and Robinson.

Right-minded Americans are amazed at how morality, values, character and truth have fallen so low since Trump became the president. He’s reported to have lied over 2,000 times in one year and yet his supporters think he’s making ‘America Great Again,’ and negative news in the media is ‘fake news.’ A term Trump throws around almost daily while thrashing the media. He even chewed out the media accompanying him to Davos by calling them ‘fake news’, during his address before leaders who are attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.

Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House, has floated another scandal. Wolff’s allegation is that the president is currently having an affair with an unidentified woman while pointing to this paragraph in his book: “Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador [of Indian origin]…is ‘as ambitious as Lucifer,’ in the characterisation of one member of the senior staff — [she] had concluded that Trump’s tenure would last, at best, a single term, and that she… could be his heir apparent.”

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2018.

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